On small towns and nicknames

The car pulled over to the curb.

The driver rolled down the window and hollered out to the gas station attendant who was pumping gasoline. He was within two blocks of Downtown Willoughby at the time.

Hey bud, how far is it to Willoughby?

“How did you know my name was Bud?” replied the owner of Brichford’s Shell Station. “I just guessed” the man said.

“Why don’t you guess how far it is to Downtown Willoughby?” Brichford shot back.

The station’s owner was Harold Brichford but nobody ever called him Harold.

The man who would become a longtime mayor of Willoughby was known by everyone in town as Bud. Nobody called him by his given name.

Such is the way with nicknames.

A few weeks ago in this space I mentioned a lot of nicknames of Willoughby people, some well known, some not so well known. They all had one thing in common. Nobody called them by their given names.

When that column appeared in the paper the first person to call me was Butch Lauderback. After we chatted for a few minutes, I said “I know your real name, it’s Clarence.” But nobody ever called him that.

In Willoughby, as in most small towns, many of the nicknames that you hear are outrageous.

A person in another town, say Wickliffe, might not know what any of them mean. You would have to know the person to know the nickname.

The outrageous nicknames of most of the Willoughby folks were bestowed on them by John Troy. I don’t know why that was, but every time John let fly with a nickname it seemed to stick. Some of the nicknames are legendary in Willoughby and unheard of outside the town.

For example some of the nicknames are Zeke, Inhume, Fooch, Chots Ballgame, Schoolie, Jaydo (abbreviated from Jaydub), Large Marge, Motts, Butt, Roundy, Derps, Lucky and Ike.

I would like to take a break because I am such a miserable typist on a laptop computer that it is taking me hours to perform a simple task but with the help of my computer guru Greg Patt and my unpaid secretary, my daughter, Kimberly we can reduce the typing time dramatically.

If you can match up any real names with nicknames, bless your heart, but there will be no prizes.

The first name on the list was Zeke. And everyone knew him as Zeke but his real name was Dave Arter. He is the only Zeke I ever knew of in Willoughby.

Zeke had a wonderful wife by the name of Helen. His mother’s name was also Helen.

I imagine both Helens knew his name was Dave. I doubt if anyone else did.

Another name on the list of arcane nicknames is Butt. Betcha you don’t know who Butt was. Why, it was Zeke’s older brother, Dick Arter. I’ll bet there aren’t four people reading this column, and that is probably an exaggeration, who could identify Butt as Dick Arter.

Next comes Inhume. He was one of the dozen or so members of the Myers family of Second Street who were know by their nicknames rather than their real names.

Included in the Myers tribe were Theo, Sis, Ralphie, KayKay, Derps, Inhume and others I don’t recall.

Inhume got his nickname because he got nervous when he was playing basketball.

When he dribbled the ball he started out slowly just like anybody else dribbling a ball but when he got closer to the basket the intensity of his dribbling became fast and furious. It was inhumanly fast.

John Troy began calling him Inhume and the name stuck. Bob Myers was always Inhume.

One of his brothers was the previously mentioned Derps, who was actually Don, a classmate of mine at Willoughby Union. We played ball together all through school. But I always liked the name Inhume better than Derps.

Fooch was Dick Taylor. His father ran a filling station at Rout 91 and Euclid Avenue in Willoughby Township and his mother was a kindergarten teacher in Wickliffe.

Fooch was an outstanding football player and he had movie star good looks. He was also perfectly groomed. When he took off his football helmet there was never a hair out of place. He looked as if he just stepped out of a barber shop.

Chots Ballgame worked behind the soda bar at Koster’s in Willoughby. He got his nickname because of the way he jingled his change in his pocket. I probably can’t explain that one and I may not want to try.

Schoolie was Jean Cage, one of three daughters of Sheriff Paul Cage.

Her son is president of one of the largest engineering firms in Ohio. Schoolie got her nickname because of the inordinate amount of school spirit she had. She had more school spirit than anyone at Union High. I don’t recall either of her other sisters having a nickname.

Jaydo (abbreviated from Jaydub) was John Walker. His nickname evolved through several stages from JayW to Jaydub to Jaydo.

Roundy was called that because of the configuration of his stomach. I wouldn’t call him fat, maybe just plump, but since his stomach was round they called him Roundy. Lucky was Dean Frost. I never knew what he was lucky at but he must have been lucky at something or they wouldn’t have called him that.

Ike Brain probably had a real name but I don’t recall whether it was Bob or Don so for the purpose of this essay we will just refer to him as Ike.

You will notice that I restricted these nicknames to Willoughby folks, so I didn’t mention Mud or Jeap because they were Wickliffe names.